we’re here for a ceremony honoring 50 TREMENDOUS artists from around the country, but all the boys can talk about is grant park. . .they’re CONVINCED that we’ll run into obama when we go. . .

i’m running around like crazy, but i just wanted to shout out the bcam crew and thank you for your INCREDIBLE work last week. i’m completely looking forward to seeing updates, reading your posts, and reconvening in brooklyn in 2009. . .

in the meantime, here’s the piece that i wrote in class on our final day together. . .

we’ve definitely accomplished a lot, as a class and as a country in the short time since we parted ways, but real talk, the bus don’t stop at the mountaintop. . .

more to come. . .

MBJ

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A tree goes to negroes to Brooklyn in search of respect

Leaps into the pocket of the borough like a kid kangaroo buried in a coffin of borrowed time

A tree mourns its falling leaves looking death like a lynched lover in it’s eye

How you tell the withered winter blossom to go green

In the cloak of its fall

A tree grows in black america

De-flowered as a dead MC gun

Blast murder unsolved

To go green go back

Remember we were once all once dreams

Adrift

Sorceress sent human spells

Of the past like

A fossil turned fuel

Turned mustard seed of bleeding edge

Ashes and ancient tears returned in the rain

Red vibrate like Africa 70 double bass

Go back

Like a branch in the storm

Eden is everywhere the divine gives useverything we need

Basic respect is a human right

Take heed

Black life too much to spare

Recycled stories of fallen soldiers and urban blight

Imagine island life

Brooklyn oak

Uptake the back breaking work of uproot

Lifting freedom in synch with season like winter winds leaving the streets I pass through I pass go

I’m past due

future classic tied fast to the mast of midnight

Species devolves

Collectively agree to proceed in the wrong direction

Subconscious manifest as global infection

See the warning

It is warming

And that’s just the block

Feel the heat like rising ghosts of dead teens levitating among falling stocks

To go GREEN you got to black

Believe that life immediately around you had implicit value and should be respected sustaining the black body politic

It’s arithmetic until you insert the variables of legacy and conspiracy